Hallucinations (1986)

The plot of Hallucinations, the Polonia Brother's first movie, is that brothers Mark and John (played respectively by Mark Polonia and John Polonia (R.I.P.)), and their stepbrother Todd (played by Todd Michael Smith) are home alone while their mother works a double shift. Suddenly, they all start having gruesome hallucinations, and none of them knows why. Their mom calls telling them she's going to be gone another day, and the three brothers must work together to figure out the cause of the hallucinations before it's too late.

First, let's talk about the hallucinations themselves. Some of them are pretty funny, but some are also surprisingly scary. Among said hallucinations we have a hilarious scene where a cat is torn up by a sentient chainsaw, a man vomiting and crapping out a purple liquid and then crapping out a knife, a man being attacked by a pipe creature in the shower, and another man being attacked by a demonic baby doll.

Now let's talk about the explanation for the hallucinations. For most of the movie, it is suggested that a "monk" who talks to one of the brothers may have something to do with them, but for the most part things are kept pretty vague, that's a good thing, the lack of explanation adds to the creepiness of the movie. We actually do get an explanation towards the end of the movie, but it doesn't make any sense.

Now let's talk about gore, gore hounds who are also fans of SOV horror and are therefore willing to look past some budgetary constraints are going to be treated to some surprisingly decent gore including the chainsaw scene with the cat I mentioned earlier, a wrist slicing, blowtorch torture, and a surprisingly good decapitation.

Another reason this movie is so scary is the fact that the only people in the movie are the three teenage brothers, who are home alone, and there seems to be nobody around who can help them, so they are forced to fend for themselves and face whatever force is causing these supernatural events alone. That's scary.

As far as technical issues go, some of the normal SOV issues are present, particularly the fact that it's shot with a home video camera. Keeping that in mind, the quality is a lot better than some of the other SOV movies I've seen. Lighting isn't really an issue here. The sound cuts in and out every once and a while, and towards the end (when everything is explained) the music drowns out the actors. Being a veteran SOV viewer, I can look past things like that as long as they're not too extreme, it's pretty forgivable here.

Scary, creepy, surreal, gory and silly all at the same time, Hallucinations surprised me, in that the Polonia Brothers actually made a good movie, rather than just an entertainingly bad one. Honestly, I still get the shivers thinking about this one.

8 out of 10 garbage bags